[ronilan]

That is partially true, but it’s flooded with people who cannot code.

I no longer believe this.

I think “people who cannot code” is a myth perpetuated by those who gain something out of it. People who’s business or job is to filter candidates, people who’s business is to sell their own “improved” version of training, people in need of an ego boost and actually, mainly by people who just repeat it cause they heard it somewhere. I’m off that train.

But, then again, I just might be old and wrong.

I literally know 100 companies that will hire you today. As a self-taught engineer you have to convince them of that, which mostly means a solid portfolio, but there is insane demand.

I’d like to test that.

That’s my homesite: https://www.ronilan.com

I’m in the market.

Thanks,

Ron

[jspiral]

As a hiring manager, my experience has been that the average unsolicited resume belongs to someone who can't implement fizzbuzz. (this has a lot to do with the population that spams resumes though i believe)

My experience has also been that most raw junior candidates need significant handholding to implement anything into a typical production system at first, and that the learning curve from there varies greatly.

What do you think?

[tracker1]

Last time I was involved in hiring I created a very simple coding challenge. I've seen far worse on the other side. The goal was to read in a CSV file, read and transform it to a different format (newline separated json) node.js preferred and put it on github. There were no restrictions on what libraries could be used, no requirements for unit tests, etc. It's something that literally took me about half an hour to write at the time. Only one candidate had a working example, even then there were a couple bugs in the transform, but at least the process worked. It's surprising to me how many junior devs cannot do a simple ETL in a scripting language.

[dublin]

Last year, I took a contract leading a dev team at a top company here in Austin. The team, largely educated in India, said doing substantial ETL-like cleanup of the pipe-separated 15GB input file would take then about 3 days: 1 day to write the Scala & Java code, and 2 days to process it through the Spark cluster. I shocked them when I called B.S.! I spent the rest of the afternoon showing what you can do with pipelines of grep, cut, paste, and awk. Took 2-3 hours to build the proper pipeline and only 15 minutes to run it on my local laptop hard disk. The sad thing is they were impressed, but still inclined to use the ridiculously complicated cluster pipelines instead, since that was "the way we were taught..."

[mattmanser]

This sort of stuff isn't taught anywhere though, you have to either be shown it by someone else in a previous job, or have it annoy you enough to figure it out with some serious google fu (and the freedom to follow that path).

It's an unknown unknown, a lot of programmers will simply not know you can use quick and dirty scripts to process data if you're only going to do it once.

I work mainly in .Net and the similar problem I see is devs who don't even know that console apps exist, let alone how to make them, which simplifies prototyping new code immensely.

[vram22]

>This sort of stuff isn't taught anywhere though, you have to either be shown it by someone else in a previous job, or have it annoy you enough to figure it out with some serious google fu (and the freedom to follow that path).

Sure it is taught. It's taught by some people ( including me - plug here for my Linux and Python courses, with testimonials: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/p/training.html ) in their Unix / Linux courses, as examples of how to really put the classic (and oft-quoted) Unix philosopy + command-line tools + shell scripting to good use, synergistically ("write small tools to do one job each, well, and connect them by pipelines and I/O redirection, etc. etc.").

It's not even rocket science; bread-and-butter EDP/IT folks (programmers and even operators) (not just clued-in software engineers in product companies) have been using such scripts for decades, routinely, without thinking they are doing anything great or out of the ordinary. (And similarly for other OSs, I'm sure, such as Rexx on some platforms. Not sure what was used on Windows before PowerShell, maybe Perl and/or one of the Unix toolkit clones like MKS Toolkit or Cygwin or UWin - apart from clunky batch file language and DOS/Windows command-line commands).

It's just that it is not so well known nowadays among the (often mainly JS-using) generation, who even write CLI apps in Node.

>It's an unknown unknown, a lot of programmers will simply not know you can use quick and dirty scripts to process data if you're only going to do it once.

It's their loss (and that of the industry), comes from not trying to learn about prior art.

There's even a name for it: NIH syndrome [1], and heck, even that is not new :) Dates from early IBM days or earlier ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

[IOT_Apprentice]

Because for some, tools like awk, sed and perhaps grep are unknown skills.

The focus is on pumping out Java or C++ folks who never were given assignments using said tools and therefore never knew or learned them. Python is the new Perl, not sure what the new awk is.

[vram22]

>Python is the new Perl, not sure what the new awk is.

Red, said sed.

[koudos]

Unfortunately, the reason they probably chose their own solution is that it was probably the easiest way to get it into production in a repeatable way in their mind with the least risk they would mess it up.

[catwind7]

My guess is that he's taking issue with this argument that I'm not quite sure was made:

"The market is flooded with people who cannot code, therefore it's easy to find a job as a junior engineer"

The market could in fact be flooded with people who cannot code (I don't know for sure). Assuming that's true, that doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to get a job as a junior dev (speaking from someone on the interviewing side).

[tomc1985]

On the market being flooded, I think it varies greatly depending on where you are and whom you are with. With my current job I am part of a competent team of smart people but on my last job it seems that IQ was in short supply, for candidates, vendors, and even our "partners".

Even though the last job ended months ago, I'm still trying to unconvince myself that everyone in this world is stupid and incompetent, because that was what it felt like.

[catwind7]

Yeah totally. I have a friend who mostly works with the IT in big banks and pretty recently he told me he had to explain what "Git" was to a more senior eng. That was shocking to me but then again maybe I'm too steeped in webdev.

[profalseidol]

This company I'm working in right now has recently migrated from CVS to Git. Still stuck in XML hell though. And nobody understand the ginormous Ant build script.

[beefalo]

The market being flooded with poor talent may even make it worse than it being flooded with good talent. Companies now need to invest a lot more time filtering out the people who can't code to hire junior candidates. Instead companies may just decide they will invest that money in the salaries for mid-level and senior engineers instead of time spent hiring juniors.

[apazzolini]

> I no longer believe this.

You should try interviewing "software engineers" that claim to have 10 years of experience architecting and coding in various languages and cannot write a function that doubles the value of each number in an array.

[geebee]

You should try interviewing as a software engineer with 10 years experience. They never ask you to double the value of each integer in an array. They ask you to find all matching subtrees in a binary tree, or to find all sub-matrices in an NxM matrix with a positive determinant in a matrix of arbitrary size, or find all words in a dictionary that can be constructed by concatenating other words in the dictionary.

The easiest questions I've been asked are unimaginative but straightforward things (build a binary tree, print inorder, find all permutations of a string, code a hash map).

There's also a particularly pernicious trend toward asking for on-line assessments or homework assignments, things that save the hiring company time but put an even greater time burden on the applicant.

I'd say "cracking the coding interview" is a good reflection of the kinds of questions you need to be prepared to answer in an interview, and they are miles away from doubling the value of each integer in an array.

I think this is why there's such a disconnect between us. You do see self-described software engineers with 10 years of experience who can't do fizzbuzz, I really do believe you. But we (the applicants) never see this, instead we see a vastly higher standard applied. Which would be fine if the companies acknowledged that they are having trouble hiring because they're extremely picky. But instead, we hear people claiming that there's a "shortage" and that they can't hire because all these supposedly senior people can't code fizz buzz.

[SovietDissident]

Which would be fine if the companies acknowledged that they are having trouble hiring because they're extremely picky.

Exactly this. I'm mid-level, trying to switch jobs. Several front-end javascript positions I interviewed for asked me anything from pretty tough algorithms to "how does Angular do namespacing" to object-oriented questions relating to Java to how to style a page and add event listeners to it without ability to reference the docs, etc.

The questions per se are not undoable, but the the sheer magnitude of the corpus they can ask questions from is what's so difficult. I accept this and try to cover as much as I can in self-study and outside courses, so I can better in future interviews. But it is a substantial burden timewise, and seems to be of diminishing marginal utility regarding actual, on-the-job performance, which is pretty annoying. Oh yeah, and then they reveal that they want to pay me $75k per year for a mid-senior position, in California. I know people who make that starting out of college as Account Managers for bigger CPG (consumer packaged goods) or pharma companies, with a company car and cell phone. (Granted, I think those jobs would be boring and also at-risk over the long-term, but the time spent/compensation difference seems out of whack.)

If there really were a shortage, companies would check for fundamentals but relax their standards and offer more on-the-job training for candidates. And wages would be significantly higher! Should get rid of H1Bs as a start, and see if that helps.

[dublin]

Amen on getting rid of the H1Bs! Not only would doing soclear out the deadwood, the improvements in skills, capabilities, communication ability, and critical thinking would dramatically slash the true cost of software development.

[taurath]

I've worked with amazing H1Bs. The problem is the great ones are always underpaid and by the time and the bad ones are encouraged to do anything to keep their jobs because their entire future is on the line.

[apazzolini]

I don't doubt that you've had poor interviewing experiences with companies that ask you to do things that are not representative of the job you're interviewing for. This is a well-known problem in our field, and as a fellow engineer with 10 years of experience, I've also encountered it.

It's also not my point at all.

The comment I was responding to was advocating that there is a myth surrounding the flood of people who don't know how to code. This is not a myth.

Doubling an array of integers is one of the easiest questions I can possibly think of, and use it to build interviewee confidence as a warm-up before diving into pragmatic questions related to the job.

Unfortunately, there is a not insignificant number of candidates who claim experience and yet are unable to write `.map(x => x * 2)` or use a for loop.

[geebee]

I'll agree, you were making a more narrow point that there are in fact a lot of candidates who can't do extremely simple coding exercises (I agree about that as well)

This assertion is often mis-used (a slight of hand to resolve the question of why companies reject so many candidates yet claim that anyone competent will find "100 companies that will hire you today".)

However, you were not making that second assertion, you were insisting that something that is real is not a myth, fair enough.

[tracker1]

I've seen both sides a number of times. Even when interviewing specifically those coming out of code-camp style organizations, there's probably 2/3 that never did anything in terms of discovery beyond what they were assigned. I'm not saying that anyone has to spend all their free time coding, but a bit of passion when starting out is the single best indicator of how a junior level developer will perform.

This other is title inflation where someone at junior-mid level has a senior title after 2-3 years of experience. It's all over the map. For every good developer, I've seen 2-3 bad developers. For every 10 good developers, you might get 1 great developer. For every 2 great developers, 1 has a personality that doesn't work well with others.

It's a challenge to build a team where you need to balance ability, room for growth with need. I also agree that the hiring practices outlined in "cracking the coding interview" are excessive for most environments. Most line of business applications will use tooling that abstracts some of the more difficult challenges. Cloud environments offer services that take care of many of the rest. In reality, there's more need for someone to have an understanding of when you might use a given SQL variant, Mongo or Cassandra (or any number of others), vs even thinking of creating your own systems.

In general, for "senior" javascript developers, I ask a single question. Something that's in every JS book from beginning to advanced that I've ever seen. And less than one in 10 give a complete answer, and less than half get it half right.

[monsieurbanana]

What's the question?

I like to ask them to explain either the concept of closures in javascript, or how `this` works.

I don't even need them to know the word closure, knowing why you can't reference a variable written inside another function, the difference between var and let, or what does bind/apply do.

[tracker1]

What are the values that equate to false in an if statement?

false, null, undefined, NaN, "" (empty string), 0

Bonus: An object with a toString() method that returns one of the above won't evaluate directly, but will roughly equal (foo == false).

sometimes I'll ask for a function that returns input as a whole number or null, if it's a string, attempt to parse base 10, return null if invalid, return null if the input isn't already a number or a string. 0 is usually what will trip people up.

[jtchang]

Doesn't an empty array also equal false?

[jtchang]

Isn't this basically atoi? Which has a lot of edge cases.

[danellis]

> You should try interviewing as a software engineer with 10 years experience. They never ask you to double the value of each integer in an array.

You shouldn't extrapolate your own experience into "never" or "always". I have twice your experience, and I've had insultingly simple questions like this. Amazon asked me to do fizzbuzz, for crying out loud.

[penguat]

we ask almost everyone the same thing, which can be resolved to one of the unimaginative but straightforward things above, but is not necessarily obvious at first glance. We fail the people who evidently can't code, not the people who fail to resolve it to the magic answer.

[ticmasta]

Well, it's pretty common to have 10 x 1 year of experience. Lots of jobs require the repetition of a relatively shallow set of skills.

When I started my current job I remember the announcement said something like 15 years experience and I thought "I've been doing lots of things for a long time, but I don't feel like I have 15 years experience in any of them" at least no the same way someone in a more stable domain might...

[tenaciousDaniel]

I've been interviewing several engineers over the last year, for the first time ever. It's _amazing_ how right you are.

I would look at a resume and think "wow this person is gonna be amazing". And then I would ask them very very basic questions, and they would get them wrong.

I still don't know what to make of it, because it doesn't make any sense to me.

[catwind7]

I just want to thank you for your perspective.

I'd also add that "junior" can mean very different things for different companies. A junior engineer at Google could very well be "mid level" or even "senior" at a different company. Maybe even a CTO at a startup.

The industry is still relatively new and I think we're still in the early stages of grappling with how to best match programming expertise with company needs.

[calibas]

I've personally worked with a number of "web developers" who can barely code HTML/CSS. They tend to fall into two categories, people who use Wordpress themes/plugins to take care of everything they need, and people who outsource cheap programmers to do all the coding for them.

I don't know exactly how common either is, but I've run into both categories multiple times doing freelance work.

[deaps]

I agree with you. I code a lot at my current job as a network engineer. I use logic in just about everything I do - that being said, I'm actually really good at what I do and I consider coding and evaluating really old code to be my strong suit, among other things. I certainly couldn't do some of these 'tests' I see people talking about - such as import a CSV and convert it to a JSON file then upload it to github...If I sat down for an interview and they asked me that, there's no doubt that I would fail. I guess I'm lucky that I like my current job.

[sinker]

I'm skeptical of that trope also. I remember that stack overflow fizzbuzz post, but I never encountered a interview candidate so bad that they couldn't program fizzbuzz. I've also never been asked to do anything as basic as code a fizzbuzz example in an interview.

Most people seemed to have workable skill levels. A pretty good portion of people seemed to still be in the novelty phase of programming where they would be slightly too excited and surprised at themself, and perhaps slightly unconfident, in answering a fairly basic question correctly.

[danellis]

> I never encountered a interview candidate so bad that they couldn't program fizzbuzz

Me neither, in the real world, but I have seen a couple of excruciating mock interview videos where the "candidate" was unable to complete the fizzbuzz task. I think this might be a result of people thinking that learning to be a developer involves following along with video tutorials on Udemy, and that as soon as some threshold is reached, they should be ready to look for work.

[koudos]

By now, I think fizzbuzz has been around enough that people know it, have heard of it, and prepare enough to solve it. I have started using variations of fizzbuzz or additional questions that builds on it and I find myself catching people who only know the fizzbuzz portion.

[scarface74]

I’ve done a version of the fizzbuzz test when zone I interviewed someone - write s function that returns true if a number is even false otherwise.

Even after I explained what an odd number was they couldn’t do it.